Joanna Newsom: Early Recordings
Can we make this thread off-limits to people who have less than 400 posts or something? This is getting. Joanna Newsom - Have one on me. Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me. The last thing the internet needs is anyone else chiming in on Joanna Newsom’s ridiculously ambitious new triple album Have One On Me. But screw it. Have One On Me manages to accomplish both - its songs are artistically stunning and just endlessly inviting.
[.zip]Tonight, it's off to see nu-hippie/Freak Folkie-cum-unlikely hipster style icon Joanna Newsomdo Berlin. And so here are some rarities by the girly-voiced harpist—selections from self-released and now discontinued EPs from 2002 and -3.
Newsom forever teeters on the edge of going too far or being too much, her undeniable talent only just balancing the cutesy and nerdy elfishness of the fantasy genre, as indulged in by a middle class youngster who has yet to experience life outside of books. Too much incense and velvet, too little… well, there's no need to be crude.
Yet Newsom's sense of melody and of syllables are evident. And her work was never derivative, already impressively sculpted and accomplished at the very outset. Debut album proper, The Milk-eyed Mender, is an even work of dreamy beauty with a sound and universe unlike any other album or artist. Subsequent work by Newsom was perhaps a tad pretentious (the sprawling, never-ending Ys) or confusing (the R&B-inflected Have One on Me, which may just as well be thought of as more experimental as it could a sell-out).
So we're staying with her early work. Before The Milk-eyed Mender came out, many of its songs had been self-released by Newsom in what could be called demo versions. Those EPs—«Walnut Whales» and «Yarn and Glue»—are currently out of print, but fret not: here are the highlights, including a few numbers that never saw release on subsequent albums.
Newsom forever teeters on the edge of going too far or being too much, her undeniable talent only just balancing the cutesy and nerdy elfishness of the fantasy genre, as indulged in by a middle class youngster who has yet to experience life outside of books. Too much incense and velvet, too little… well, there's no need to be crude.
Yet Newsom's sense of melody and of syllables are evident. And her work was never derivative, already impressively sculpted and accomplished at the very outset. Debut album proper, The Milk-eyed Mender, is an even work of dreamy beauty with a sound and universe unlike any other album or artist. Subsequent work by Newsom was perhaps a tad pretentious (the sprawling, never-ending Ys) or confusing (the R&B-inflected Have One on Me, which may just as well be thought of as more experimental as it could a sell-out).
So we're staying with her early work. Before The Milk-eyed Mender came out, many of its songs had been self-released by Newsom in what could be called demo versions. Those EPs—«Walnut Whales» and «Yarn and Glue»—are currently out of print, but fret not: here are the highlights, including a few numbers that never saw release on subsequent albums.
- Yarn and Glue
- The Book of Right-on
- Bridges and Balloons
- Sprout and the Bean
- The Fray
- «En Gallop!»
- Erin
- What We Have Known
- Peach, Plum, Pear
From
: Nevada City, three hours into the woods and mountains from the Mission. Arguably it is still the Bay Area -- intrepid commuters do make the trip to San Francisco every day. Those who don’t follow Joanna Newsom very closely often think of her as an ethereal, rootless figure, somebody who drifted in from fairyland. She‘s not that. She’s rooted to the soil and she sings about it all the time. Sometimes she uses metaphor, but she’s not afraid to get specific. Most of her standout songs are set in California, including the finest one on this collection, called “In California”.
Genre: You could call it college rock, but it doesn't exactly rock. Pop, with its connotations of catchiness, doesn't really get at it either -- although parts of 'Have One On Me' are surprisingly catchy. To call it 'art song' suggests that Newsom is aiming for a highbrow audience; the sort of crowd that attends concerts at Lincoln Center rather than the Mercury Lounge. I have no doubt that Joanna Newsom could wow the Carnegie Hall set if that were what she was after, but she's more likely to play the same stages that the New Pornographers do, and we ought to remember that's a choice she's made. Whatever you do, don't call it 'freak folk': there's nothing plainspoken or down-home about this artist, and she isn't a freak. Neurotic, yes, unusually intelligent, yes, freaky-deeky?, not at all. Because she uses ten-dollar words, Newsom sometimes gets lumped in with the Honors Thesis types, the singing literati: writers like Will Sheff of Okkervil River, Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, ostentatiously bookish types like that. Her vocabulary and her tendency to go long (there's even a song on this collection called 'Go Long') have drawn the ire of certain populists in the rock-critical establishment; Robert Christgau said 'Ys,' her last set, reeked of privilege. Certainly she is not under the same economic pressures that impoverished rappers on the grind are. She'll write her seventeen-minute symbolic narrative songs, and if folks don't like them, she'll pack up her harp and go home. If the intimidating 'Ys' proved anything, it's that Joanna Newsom doesn't need you: to listen, to understand, to fork over your hard-earned cashola. She could have followed up 'The Milk-Eyed Mender' with a small-scale crowd-pleaser. That she didn't, or wouldn't, might offend those who resent the incursion of the McSweeney's crowd into the world of popular music. But if Joanna Newsom isn't busking for pocket change, it's foolish to imply that she isn't under a different kind of pressure. Songwriters do not go over the seven minute mark, time and again, unless they're hounded by furies. The Newsom project displays more practical urgency than all the punk bands on the Bowery put together; this woman is driven, terribly so, and if, in the face of that, all you can point out is the very real possibility that she's never been skint, then you're doing yourself a disservice. Because she's going to keep on singing, see, and you're going to miss the show.
Format: There is only one way to top an album with a seventeen-minute centerpiece, and that's to release two and a quarter hours of music, all at once, spread over three disks. 'Have One On Me' is a mini boxed-set: open up the case, and you'll find a lyric booklet, and sleeves marked one, two, and three. Each is decorated with a cute photo of Joanna Newsom in a short dress and pointy shoes, putting up her hair; she is not above fanservice. Ever meticulous, Newsom has divided the collection evenly: six songs per disc. In a concession to the iPod age, some of the advance hype suggested that 'Have One On Me' was really three separate albums released all at once, and you weren't expected to sit there and listen to the artist scraping her harp for one hundred and thirty minutes straight, not really -- I mean, it's a fast-paced world, and there are season premieres to catch that can't be Tivoed. If you jump around, an out-for-vengeance Joanna Newsom isn't going to burst through your front door with a flaming sword, but it is pretty clear to this first time caller and long-time listener that she means for you to experience 'Have One On Me' as a complete statement. She's an album artist; she never would have ended a set with a track that begs for the kind of resolution that 'Occident' -- the HOOM disc 2 closer -- does. Consider also that ideas developed in the very first song on HOOM1 are brought to a satisfying conclusion on the last song of HOOM3, and that that last song on HOOM3 is a reprise of the epic track in the middle of HOOM2. (And yes, I do enjoy referring to this massive, sometimes-overwhelming set as HOOM; it sounds like a supercomputer crossed with a loom crossed with a vacuum cleaner, which, come to think of it, isn't a halfway-bad description of Newsom's brain.) If you made it through '69 Love Songs' or, for you Jersey emo types, 'The Mother, The Mechanic, And The Path,' 'Have One On Me' ought to be no sweat. I do recognize that attention spans are shortening by the hour, and that those who would once have gladly listened to 'Tales From Topographic Oceans' in a trance are now busy channel-surfing and text-messaging and voting for the latest American Idol. You might conclude that anybody who'd actually bother to absorb 'Have One On Me' in one sitting is either 1.) a technophobe who cannot get with the earth-shattering, synapse-scrambling, aphasia-precipitating possibilities of the new technologies, 2.) some kind of crazy, or 3.) hopelessly in love with Joanna Newsom. I could be any one of those things, or several of them; I'll let you decide at the end of the review. But even if I am, that does not preclude the possibility that the full megadose of HOOM is good tonic for your soul. If it is, I mean; I haven't begun to render judgment here. An epic album deserves an epic write-up, and if the artist can go long, this cagy interlocutor can, too.
Arrangements: Van Dyke Parks's orchestral arrangements on 'Ys' fell somewhere between the Boston Pops, 'Pleasures Of The Harbor,' and Looney Tunes. To call them exhausting doesn't begin to describe their symphonic hyperactivity; word had it that Newsom herself pushed Parks to go further and further out. Touring the 'Ys' material presented challenges: how might one small, young woman and her big old harp represent something like 'Emily,' which, on record, sounded like a jackknifed tractor-trailer spill of strings and woodwinds? Not without the help of friends, it turns out. Newsom's Ys Street Band (tee hee) is, above all, a gang of game utilitymen -- distorted guitar here, jovial woodwinds over there, some whomping on a timpani and yanking at a Bulgarian tamboura to color the corners, whatever helps to reinforce the sweep of Newsom's ambitious writing. On 'Have One On Me,' the band raided the closets for instruments I've never heard of, and after listening to pop music for a thousand years, I thought I'd heard them all: I mean, what's a tarhu? What's a kemence? How about a rebec, what the heck is that? It's possible, I guess, to pick the tarhu and its exotic counterparts out of these mixes, but that's a task for your thirtieth listen. Because on your first twenty-nine at least, you're going to be concentrating on Newsom's own instruments: her harp, which is played masterfully, and her piano, which is played, um, enthusiastically. Ten of eighteen tracks on 'Have One On Me' do have some kind of drum part, but there's never much of a backbeat, and for much of HOOM2 (the slow one), the percussion goes on vacation. Ditto for Ryan Francesconi's electric guitar -- it's in and out, and even when it's highlighted (at the end of 'Baby Birch,' for instance) he's hardly shredding. The strings and horns are nowhere near as obtrusive as they were on 'Ys'; if the band here never possesses the relaxed charm of the Illinoisemakers, they don't sound martial, either. The musicians stick with Newsom for the same reason you do: the songwriting, the voice, and maybe the harp, too. It sounds about the same as it did on 'The Milk Eyed Mender' and the early EPs; she's not running it through a wah-wah. Likely you heard 'Sawdust And Diamonds' from 'Ys,'; that was her virtuoso performance, and having shown you how fast she can play, she's retreated a bit from the Yngwie approach. Maybe she's got bigger fish to fry, and maybe she just doesn't want to step on the rebec.
What's this album about?: An early review of 'Have One On Me' called it a three-disc love letter to Newsom's boyfriend. Synthesizing an album as long-winded as this after a pass or two can't be easy, but I'll bet that writer would like a do-over. There are, maybe, four stanzas of unmitigated joy on this three-disc set; the rest is trouble, and not always of the romantic sort. Yes, she kicks off the marathon by telling her beau that she's easy to keep, but the caveats come fast: everything is fine as long as she's willing to be subsumed by the concerns of the relationship. Which, given her ambition, isn't long. By the second verse, she's 'dulling and dumbing in the service of the heart alone'; by the end of the song, she's comparing herself to Bloody Mary. 'I fell for you, honey, easy as falling asleep,' she sings on 'Good Intentions Paving Company.' This from a narrator who takes pains elsewhere on the collection to make it clear she's got debilitating insomnia. When Newsom does sleep, she dreams, and the visions aren't pretty. On 'Go Long,' she's presented to her lover in a rickshaw made of the broken bodies of his old girlfriends. In another, as the crowd cheers, a tarantula mounts a countess's brassiere. The whole shebang climaxes with a nightmare: in 'Kingfisher,' the penultimate track on HOOM3, Newsom's boyfriend stabs her in the chest, and blood rushes out of her body in an infinite torrent, 'spreading in a circle like an atom bomb.' This is a Shakespearean tragedy of an album, and by that I don't mean the poetry is excellent, even though it is. Nevada City's most famous export is a nature girl, and nature is red in tooth and claw. 'Have One On Me,' a menagerie in the truest sense, contains: a frog, a daddy longlegs, that tarantula, dead flies, a trout, several horses, one stolen, one a black mare, a skinned bunny (more on her in a bit), a bark-beetle, three bears (two black), a fox that eats the singer's goldfish, jackrabbits with broken necks, two dancing monkeys, the business end of a bee, crickets, a bulldog, a waxwing, a mutt from the municipal pound, a pup in the barley, a serpent, a lion. Then there's the crowded aviary -- two geese, a crane, hawks, vultures, starlings, magpies, blue jays, mourning doves, a keening loon (by a leaning moon), the kingfisher. Newsom's (not the narrator's) boyfriend is reliably likened to a spider: predatory, web-spinning, poised to devour. As for the artist herself, she's twisting and writhing against him, 'like something caught on a barbed-wire fence'. Most of HOOM takes place in forest glades, gardens, and country houses. When Newsom sings on 'In California' that her heart is heavy as an oil-drum, the sudden appearance of heavy industry makes the simile feel as alarming as a fist banging on a metal plate. Human characters are imagined as wild animals, most caught in a struggle to persevere and survive; God, here, is distant, and natural law is manifest and presiding. And what is lawless, godawful, against nature? Love, the singer wails, on 'Soft As Chalk.' Love comes to the forest and interrupts, it subverts, it sends unwanted ripples through the pond. 'Have One On Me' isn't the first album to blame sociobiology for the breakdown of a relationship; what's different here is that Newsom herself doesn't seem to be complaining. Rueful and heartbroken she is, but she's also resigned to the ferocious order of the jungle; an order that is upset by the romantic affectations of a boyfriend who is, in any case, unable to transcend his own animal nature. She's something that sprung up in the dirt, 'rich as roe,' of Nevada City; she'll be in her hometown for good, she reminds us on 'Autumn,' and the California state line is the border of her heart. There are also strong intimations that something has gone terribly wrong inside of the garden, and that the narrator's own biology isn't behaving: a pregnancy averted, or terminated, or ended in miscarriage; notes of infanticide, sacrifice, child abandonment, negligence in the deep woods. 'Esme' strains to be cheerful about somebody else's baby but doesn't quite get there; 'On A Good Day' hints at a missed opportunity. Then there's the gut-punching 'Baby Birch,' which, in the noncommittal-but-not-really spirit of 'Bear' by the Antlers, comes just shy of suggesting that an abortion has really screwed the protagonist up. 'I hated to close the door on you,' Newsom sings of the title character, and it quickly becomes apparent that she's writing about a child, not a boyfriend. With some distaste, she watches goslings fumbling along aside their mother. The music changes (the music on HOOM is full of changes), and into the song barge the sinister cast of a nursery rhyme: a blacksmith, a shepherd, a barber, a butcher-boy. But it's the main character who grabs the bunny and, as it kicks and mewls, puts it to the knife. 'I thought it would be harder to do, but I caught her and skinned her quick,' she concedes. Like so much of this blood-spattered set, the horror here -- both natural and un-natural -- is vivid; even worse, some of the violence is this graceful, elfin, and menacingly-intellectual writer's own doing. The rest is the fault of nature, that indifferent matron.
The singer: During the making of HOOM, Joanna Newsom developed nodules on her vocal chords and had to undergo surgery. According to reports, Newsom couldn't sing at all, or speak, or cry. In retrospect, those of us who appreciated the vocal approach on 'The Milk-Eyed Mender' might have seen this coming: her singing on that set was unbelievable, in the sense that it was nearly impossible to believe that that voice was coming from a young woman. The singer of 'Bridges And Balloons,' for instance, sounded like an irate, precocious eight-year old, abandoned and hungry in some godforsaken Appalachian holler. Understandably, Joanna Newsom didn't like being compared to a little kid, and for 'Ys,' she grew her voice up in a rush. But she still hurled vowels and consonants at the listener in a possessed flurry (the conclusion of 'Cosmia' is Newsom at her most arresting, and that's saying something), and she still seemed to be tying her neck in a sailor's knot as she sang. Baseball fans, imagine early Newsom as a phenom pitcher, up from the minors and blowing people away with pure unhittable stuff, but with a delivery that invited injury. It's a crude, slightly disrespectful analogy, I know, but it's one that holds up -- because the 2010 version of Joanna Newsom is addressing the microphone like a pitcher back from a year on the disabled list. The Newsom of 'Mender' makes occasional appearances; on 'In California,' she spends an impossible stanza cuckooing like a clock. But more often, the singer who yelped her way straight through 'Inflammatory Writ' in what seemed to be one hellacious, spitefully held breath now sounds reserved, and maybe even tentative. I realize that many people who loathed Joanna Newsom's early performances consider the vocals on HOOM a massive improvement; she's 'learned how to sing,' just as veteran pitchers who've been through the mill have 'learned how to pitch.' Perhaps she has: the early Newsom would never have had the patience to execute the intricate note runs on the title track or in 'No Provenance.' However, she's also begun over-relying on her pro vibrato; not a problem in limited doses, but this becomes downright wearisome over the course of a three-disc set. At times on HOOM, she double or triple-tracks harmonies, and sets all the voices quavering at once; the opening verses of 'Good Intentions Paving Company' is a particularly extreme example. It's a cool effect, I guess, just as running a guitar signal through a Moogerfooger produces a pleasantly scrambled sound. Yet it makes it hard to understand what she's singing, and on an album as intricate as this one, that smarts.
The songs: Newsom began as a Dylanesque, or Cohenesque, songwriter; like Dylan or Cohen, she'd come up with a nice melodic phrase and keep repeating it for as long as she had things left to say about whatever she was on about. 'This Side Of The Blue,' one of the best songs on 'Mender,' is an instructive example: it does the same thing, over and over, until she completes her observations. Then she puts a bow on it with a nifty final verse, she stops plucking for a few seconds, and fires up the next one. Lots of lyrics-first songwriters have used this technique; it works well for folksingers who want the repetition of metric patterns to do the rhythmic work that, in rock, is traditionally handled by the drummer. Phil Ochs was addicted to it. Joanna Newsom, however, has musical gifts that exceed those of Dylan, Cohen, and Phil Ochs (yes she does), and she soon began bumping up against the limitations of the strategy. Rather than edit herself, she experimented with multi-section songs, casting aside verse-chorus formalism in favor of something freer. On 'Ys,' she sped up and slowed down, wrote prefaces and codas ('Monkey And Bear' had one of each), allowed melodic patterns to twist into releases, descants, bridges to nowhere, repeated bits, sudden irruptions, false endings and false starts. It wasn't pastiche, and it wasn't postmodern; it was a classical student with piles of delicate-hand journals, opinionated and courageous, in firm control of her own voluminous writing, unwilling to prune it back for the sake of the radio, or her fans, or her friends in Nevada City, or her frenemies in the music press. Its centerpiece was an undertaking -- the seventeen-minute 'Only Skin,' which stretched into endless mist like the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and which, in a post-release interview, Newsom insisted was impossible to abbreviate. Can't call her wrong: she had thematic mileage to cover, and she was going to cover it, pop, rock, and 'freak folk' expectations be damned. Nothing on 'Have One On Me' is as daunting as 'Only Skin,' which isn't to imply that Newsom has wimped out. On the contrary: she's preserved the harmonic and formal complexity of 'Ys,' and hammered it into a somewhat more disciplined shape. Most of the songs have recognizable releases, even if they're just tag lines that Newsom sings a few times in a row. The trajectories of these songs -- even the multi-part mind-scramblers like 'Kingfisher' -- make logical sense; maybe not immediately, but give yourself two or three listens and you'll grok what she's doing in each one. Sometimes she starts out frantic and lets the waves ebb away to a calm tide; other times, like on 'Ribbon Bows,' she jumps between simple folk tunes and weirder sections that develop those melodies in illuminating directions. One song -- the pretty 'On A Good Day,' which kicks off HOOM2 -- is even notable for its brevity. More representative is 'In California,' which seeds its verse with eight majestic, unusual chord changes, dives into a near-gospel chorus, dallies in a gorgeous post-chorus that does that major-to-minor thing you might remember from your music theory class, cooks up another batch of verses, takes on the chorus from a slightly skewed angle, sets up the crazy cuckoo section I referred to earlier, and touches ground with a lengthy coda that nods to the other sections while developing a brand new melodic idea. I'm mixing metaphors; she does, too. She throws so much into these compositions that she's bound to occasionally trip over her own eloquence. But unlike 'Ys,' where Newsom built nothing but labyrinths, HOOM periodically revisits the Dylanesque style of 'Mender'. 'Does Not Suffice,' which closes the collection, yanks out the chorus of 'In California' and treats it as a succinct, repetitive melodic idea, just like 'This Side Of The Blue.' Sure, you could call it minutes ten through sixteen of 'In California'. Newsom admits as much in the liner notes, where 'Does Not Suffice' is referred to as a reprise. Or you could call it a return to winsome folk-pop from a singer who has largely abandoned the style. She's a slippery character, this Newsom; she'll have it both ways if you let her.
What differentiates this album from others in its genre?: The 'genre,' in this case, is music by Joanna Newsom; I hope we can all agree that comparing her to any of her contemporaries at this point is a loser's game. (There are older singers whose album-oriented work her music evokes: Van the Man, for instance, also exercised remarkable control over songs of gravity-defying length, and then there's that notorious art-jazz-pop-protest folkie from the Saskatoon MSA whom Newsom sometimes seems to be channeling, but we'll get to that later.) HOOM is less of a harp spectacular than her prior sets; those skeins and waterfalls of notes that decorated 'Mender' and 'Ys' recur on 'Go Long' but pop up only occasionally elsewhere. A few of the harp parts on HOOM are simple enough that it's possible to imagine that the songs were written on another instrument and ported over to Newsom's moneymaker to suit the production. It's more likely that she's learned to lay back and trust her group. 'Have One On Me' is the first Joanna Newsom album where the contributions of her bandmembers feel consequential, rather than merely supplementary. On 'Ys,' everything seems to have been guided by Newsom's vision -- even Van Dyke Parks's orchestral arrangements felt like the master's desperate attempts to please a demanding pupil. But I do not gather that Ryan Francesconi's moody guitar meditations at the ends of 'Baby Birch' and 'Does Not Suffice' are the sort of thing that Newsom would have come up with on her own. They feel like commentary from a discrete musical intelligence. It is telling that both HOOM1 and HOOM3 end with Francesconi instrumental outros: other people besides Joanna Newsom inhabit this album's universe, and she's willing to let go of the reins for dramatic effect. 'Baby Birch' concludes with Newsom singing goodbye to the lost child; Francesconi takes over with a wave of six-string feedback. 'Does Not Suffice' ends with Newsom packing her bags and leaving the country house; her melody is drowned in reverb, and Francesconi's guitar stutters and spits like a stuck snake. She's not ready to allow other voices on her albums; it's still her room, and she remains determined to interior-decorate in the colors she likes best. There are, however, far fewer kids' books on the shelves these days. Unless you were hip to the initial EPs, your introduction to Newsom was a story about a ship sailing to Cair Paravel. (If I'm ever lucky enough to get to Cair Paravel, by the way, I expect Joanna Newsom to be the court musician.) 'Monkey And Bear' told the story of an exploitative relationship allegorically, as a fairy tale might, populated by talking animals and finished with a magic realist's fantastic flourish. On 'Have One On Me,' most of the hallucinations are reserved for the dream sequences -- when Newsom is awake, her language is frank, descriptive, cinematic rather than literary. Much as I love kid's lit, I've got to admit that it's an improvement, not because Joanna Newsom needed to get 'down to earth' or anything silly like that, but because she's one of the few artists since Springsteen who can extend her metaphors over three discs. HOOM1-3 is all one story, busy with subchapters and occasional footnotes but still direct, a two-hour challenge to somebody, maybe you.
What's not so good?: Nevada City is a walkable town, and crashing your old Buick around in the woods in which 'Have One On Me' is set is not encouraged by the rangers. Newsom jets from city to city with her harp. If she hasn't driven a car since her license test, it wouldn't exactly surprise me. Listening to this set while you're is a hopeless task: crank it up as loud as it'll go, and you still won't be able to make out what she's saying. Alarmingly, that's also true if you're playing the album in the solitude of your teepee. Even with cans on, there are many stretches of HOOM -- particularly HOOM3, where the stories climax -- where Newsom's words are incomprehensible at any volume. I can't even begin to understand why this might be: often, she's accompanied by nothing but her harp. It might be a mixing slip-up, or a consequence of her surgically-altered voice, or blowback from all the vibrato; in any case, it's a major problem. An album with words this carefully assembled, right down to the syntactic structures of the clauses, ought to play clearly. Instead, a flood of unpunctuated (and tremulous) vowels sogs up the mixes; Newsom's black humor, which has never been sharper than it is here, is completely swamped. 'Go Long' is both vicious and hilarious -- it's the song where she gets some digs in at the big spider in her bed -- but it might take you several plays before you realize that. You might never realize it. Hence, I urge you with all the urging I have to urge to listen to 'Have One On Me' with the lyric booklet in front of you. Better still, take it out of the case and treat it like a storybook; trust me, Newsom's writing holds up to that kind of examination. If she weren't a classical harpist, she could shut down your local poetry slam for good. So take your little black booklet out of the case, stop ogling the pictures, read it from top to bottom; you'll be rewarded. Oh, what's that you say? You won't go to the record store and plunk $20 for your own copy of 'Have One On Me'? Your, um, 'friend' with a Limewire account 'e-mailed' you some MP3s for your iPod, and you're satisfied? In that case, pal, I don't even consider you an owner of this album. Joanna Newsom knocked herself out making a set meant to stand alongside your '70s favorites, so act if it's the Nixon Administration and Nick Drake has just cranked out a new one. C'mon, you spend nine bucks to see whatever lousy blockbuster Hollywood is slinging at you. You drop fifteen on a weak cocktail. You spend eight dollars to get out of the state. You can afford to part with a portrait of Jackson for a ride like this.
Recommended?: In the thirty-nine years since the release of 'Blue,' roughly one million female singer-songwriters have stepped to the microphone to kick a verse or two. Nine hundred thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of them were compared to Joni Mitchell. (The other one was Lydia Lunch.) About five of those singer-songwriters genuinely merited the comparison. Joanna Newsom is one of those five. Now, before the Joni deathsquad seizes me and throws me down, down, down that dark ladder, let me make it clear that I am not saying Joanna Newsom is as good as Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell is the storm of the century. She could compose mindblowing, free-flowing recicative like 'Lesson In Survival,' and turn around and pitch 'Both Sides Now' to Frank Sinatra. She kicks butt on the guitar and the piano; hand her a dulcimer and she'll kick butt on the dulcimer. We're never going to see another Joni Mitchell, people, so we might as well not look. Sometimes, though, we'll catch a reflection in the mirror somewhere, just a flash, even, and it lights up the room so spectacularly that it bears mentioning. Joanna Newsom is more than just a flash: she's an heir to the queen's crown, and a worthy one. Like Joni Mitchell, she's capable of throwing all kinds of jarring note-clusters and odd patterns and melodic departures into songs that still somehow play as pop. Like Joni Mitchell, she writes long, brainy songs with wordy stanzas that read from the lyric sheet like poetry: not the stuff you used to write in seventh grade, but the stuff they made you study in seventh grade. Like Joni Mitchell, Newsom seems to be inventing her own harmonic vocabulary as she goes along, banging together pitches that don't, initially, seem to work, and then singing another funny note against the chord. Then, as she does in 'Jackrabbits,' she makes a chorus out of it, a gorgeous chorus, hanging there, suspended, against all laws of sonic gravity. Mitchell and Newsom both treat dissonance like a wild animal, something to be stroked until it purrs, but not so gently that it won't bare its teeth. And like Mitchell, Newsom believes in the record album, not as a repository for a collection of good ideas, but as a sustained statement. Arguably, it is much harder to have that faith in the album in 2010 than it was in 1974, when all the cool people were doing it. That Joanna Newsom sometimes sounds like Joni Mitchell on 'Have One On Me' is almost incidental to the argument I'm making. I say 'almost,' because there are more than a few stretches on this three-disc set that are so reminiscent of early-'70s Mitchell that you'd be forgiven if you thought there was some sort of musical transmigration going on. Most great artists sound less like their antecedents as they age; Newsom's artistic heritage becomes more apparent with each release. For instance, there's a moment on 'Soft As Chalk' where she pulls up and sings 'who-oo-oo is there?' in funny intervals that only would have occurred to JN or JM, in a voice that swoops from note to unlikely note like 'That Song About The Midway'. Then, just to let you know that she knows that you know and everything's cool, she follows it up with a shaky little piano line straight from Laurel Canyon. So if you appreciate Joni Mitchell, 'Have One On Me' will not be alien territory for you. If you are one of the many who consider Joni Mitchell unparalleled, and take affront to any approach to her title, this could be a good time to drop your dukes and get with a young singer-songwriter who has taken all the right things from her legendary source. (If you don't like Joni Mitchell, what's wrong with you?) By no means is Newsom a copycat: how many talented harpists are we working with these days? She's an honest-to-God successor to one of the all-time greats -- and if she sometimes acts like she knows it, well, arrogance was always part of Mitchell's appeal, too. So when Joanna Newsom asks you to listen, closely, for two and a quarter hours, you do it. When she throws twists at you, you keep an eye on the road and a steady hand on the wheel, and you make those pin-turns. When she ululates her way through the climax of a long narrative song and you can't make out what she's singing, you go to the lyric book and follow along. If she's obscure, if she's talky, if she's tough, if she goes long, if she tosses her hooks in the tackle box and closes it, you remember that she does so because she's decided that she has to, and her decisions are always well-considered. 'Have One On Me' doesn't beat 'The Milk Eyed Mender,' but it's probably better than 'Ys,' and while that's still pretty good, qualitative distinctions between Newsom albums are almost beside the point. What we have here is the latest (and longest) installment in an epistolary saga worth following to its conclusion. Pop is supposed to be breezy and catchy and disposable; one hard drive crashes and that's okay, because you can load the next one up with different versions of the same ephemeral thing. But we need stories for the ages, too. As long as Joanna Newsom is around, we're guaranteed to have some.